Defining Their Voice – Building Maps

It’s often a challenge for small businesses to develop a fleshed out marketing strategy on their own while juggling all the other responsibilities required to keep things running. Our friends at Building Maps had taken things a long way but needed a little extra help developing the messaging to connect with their audience.

When we first sat down with Building Maps it was to strategize and brainstorm ideas for a branded video project. They wanted a brief, emotive piece that could be used on their website and on targeted landing pages. As part of discovery we reviewed their existing brand tools to learn more about their business and get a feel for how they were presenting themselves to their customer base. In doing so we realized that there was a lack of definition surrounding our clients message – they needed a voice.

Project Details

Defining Their Voice

Like many businesses, our client had spent years focused on the basics; here are the products we offer, here’s why we’re different, etc. The problem with focusing on too much on the products in your messaging is twofold – it can become bogged down by product details and you miss out on establishing an emotional connection with your customers. We call that emotional connection “the Why.”

We moved from a product-based messaging to more purpose-based messaging, focused on why using a professional to create your safety and evacuation maps is easier, more cost effective, and much, much safer. This allowed us to create messaging tools that were more consistent and tailored to connect to their desired audience.

Video

The first piece the created for the newly defined brand voice was the brand video. We were tasked with creating something that would evoke emotions surrounding fire safety, of the uncertainty that comes with trying to create your own safety and evacuation maps without professional consultation. We needed to work closely with our client to stay within a tight budget, something we are very accustomed to doing with small businesses.

Website

One of the primary (and sometimes only) tools small businesses have for reaching clients is their website. When we first met with Building Maps they had just finished designing and developing a new site. And while it looked nice and performed well, our client couldn’t help but feel like something was off. During discovery we realized that the reason it looked off was it needed some content strategy and messaging to really shine.

We worked to merge our new messaging strategy into the site by writing new copy and developing graphics that helped foster a sense of urgency and gravity around the creation of safety and fire maps. In doing so we found that our client was having issues making content and copy updates to their site, so we rebuilt it. We used the same basic design but laid it over top of a simple to manage WordPress theme which features robust visual page-building tools and highly-customizable templates.